What is timely about this if anyone noticed my mentioning on another thread the recent lunch I had with four female relatives who opined (and whined) about it being a man's world used as their central example the allegation that women cannot get jobs being waitresses in high end fancy restaurants. The restaurant we were in was higher end and yes the servers were all waiters. A few days later I went with family to another high end restaurant (the second times in months) and true to their allegation all the servers were men. (though not mentioned many were possibly gay which is politically correct?). I am not sure why this is. I once thought that it was because traditionally men were the "bread" winners and it was felt like they had families to support. Certainly that may have been the excuse in ages past but today many women are the breadwinners. And why should that be the arbiter of who gets a serving job?

*****Women Waiting Tables Provide Most of Female Gains in U.S.

By Ian Katz & Alex Tanzi - Sep 19, 2013 12:01 AM ET .

It’s almost 6 p.m. on a Friday and the tables near the bar at The Hamilton in downtown Washington are getting crowded. That means waitress Victoria Honard is busy.

Honard, 22, who graduated from Syracuse University in May, works about 25 hours a week at the restaurant while looking for a job related to public policy. She moved to Washington four days after graduation with the hope of finding a position at a think tank or policy-related organization, she said, and has applied to about 20 prospective employers.

Women Waiting Tables Provide Most of Female Gains in U.S.

A waitress serves customers at the Bouchon Bakery at The Shops at Columbus Circle mall in New York. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

“The response has been minimal,” said Honard, whose degree focused on education, health and human services. “There are two ways of looking at it. I could be extremely frustrated and be bitter, or I can make the most of it, and I’m trying to take the latter approach.”

Unemployment data appear to reflect big advances for women. The jobless rate in August for females 20 years and older was 6.3 percent, the lowest since December 2008, compared with 7.1 percent for men. As recently as January, the rate was 7.3 percent for both genders, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The downside is that the gains have been largely in lower-paying industries such as waitresses, in-home health care, food preparation and housekeeping. About 60 percent of the increase in employment for women from 2009 to 2012 was in jobs that pay less than $10.10 an hour, compared with 20 percent for men, according to a study by the National Women’s Law Center using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Soft Spot

The numbers expose a soft spot in an economic recovery that has reduced the overall unemployment rate to 7.3 percent from 10 percent in October 2009. Quality of jobs is an increasing concern for U.S. policy makers and economists since it affects the level of incomes and wage disparities.

Of the 125,000 jobs women gained last month, 54,000 were in retail, leisure and hospitality, and just 24,000 in professional and business services. Many of those are part-time, 34 hours or less a week.

Food services and drinking places have added 354,000 jobs this year alone. “The place jobs have grown the most has been in these parts of the economy that women have traditionally filled more easily,” said Diane Swonk, who studies labor trends as chief economist for Mesirow Financial Inc. in Chicago.

Women have taken restaurant and retail jobs instead of teaching and other public-sector career positions that have disappeared, said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the Washington-based law center. Females lost 444,000 public-sector jobs in the four years starting in June 2009, when the recession ended, compared with 290,000 for men.

Without Degrees

“They are taking jobs as baristas in Starbucks and other jobs that used to go to people without college degrees,” Entmacher said. “It’s an anecdote but it’s also a fact.”

Women who worked full-time in 2012 received $37,791 in median income, 77 percent of what men earned, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report Sept. 17. That percentage has changed little since 2007. The number of men working full-time rose by 1 million from 2011 to 2012, while the change for women wasn’t statistically significant, according to the bureau’s data.

“The very definition of what it means to be middle class is being undercut by trends in our economy that must be addressed,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a Sept. 17 speech in Washington. “These trends -- like the increase in income inequality and the decline in upward mobility -- did not happen overnight.”

Dropping Out

While students and recent graduates are taking low-wage jobs to get started, other women are turning them down. About 2 million married women have dropped out of the work force since 2008.

“If they’re in a two-income house they’re more willing to drop out and take care of the children because it costs too much for day care,” Swonk said.

Quality of jobs is tied directly to economic growth, she said.

“Growth is a magician when it comes to employment because it pulls people out of the woodwork that might not have worked otherwise and gives them an opportunity,” Swonk said. “We’re not going to have robust growth for a while.”

Education may eventually shift the trend in favor of women, who accounted for a record 52 percent of college graduates in 2012. They passed men in 2005 and have gradually increased the lead every year since.

Part-time Dentist

After finishing a one-year residency in New York, Monica Delwadia, a 29-year-old dentist, started working three days a week at a clinic in Leesburg, Virginia. She was married in July and moved in with her husband in Germantown, Maryland. Since Delwadia is licensed to work as dentist in Virginia and not in Maryland, she commutes 50 minutes to make the 33-mile drive each way to Leesburg.

“It seems to me there might be a little bit of an economy effect,” said Delwadia, who attended Emory University in Atlanta and went to the University of Tennessee’s College of Dentistry in Memphis. In better times, patients are more willing to pay for preventive and cosmetic work, she said.

“Now it’s more like, ‘This one tooth is bothering me. Let’s just take care of this, and I’ll call you if I want to do the rest of the work,’” she said.

Delwadia likes the clinic and said she hopes to pick up more hours. She said she also may eventually look for a second job at another dental office.

Bracing Themselves

Some students not yet in the workforce are bracing themselves for settling for jobs outside their area of study.

Alexandra Allmand, 22, said it might be difficult to find a position in human resources or recruiting when she graduates from George Washington University in December.

Allmand, who studies psychology, is a hostess at District Commons, a restaurant near the university’s campus in Washington. She said she will look for internships in addition to jobs “because I can’t be picky.”

For many workers in their 20s, “it’s catch-as-catch-can,” said Stephen Bronars, senior economist at Welch Consulting in Washington, who specializes in employment and labor issues. “The economy hasn’t really picked up enough to get all of them into full-time work.”

At the Hamilton, two blocks from the White House, Honard often waits on lawmakers and government officials, giving her a glimpse of people she would like to work with someday. This summer she served a member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, to whom she recommended a glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc.

Waiting Tables

Though she doesn’t want to stick with it long-term, waiting tables comes easily to Honard. As soon as she turned 18, the minimum age for working where alcohol is served, she started as a waitress at Calamari’s Squid Row, the restaurant her parents own in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she grew up.

She decided to move to Washington because it’s an obvious destination for those working in public policy and she enjoyed the city during an internship with a charter school organization two summers ago.

Honard said she frequently searches Syracuse’s alumni program to scout for job openings and uses a network the university has on LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD)’s website.

“It’s a gradual process, and I try to be systematic about it,” she said. “I’m just lucky I have something to support myself in the meantime.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Ian Katz in Washington at ikatz2@bloomberg.net; Alexandre Tanzi in Washington at atanzi@bloomberg.net*****

Differences in How Men and Women Think Are Hard-WiredRecent Studies Raise the Possibility That Male Brains Are Wired for Focus, Female Brains for MultitaskingBy Robert Lee HotzDec. 9, 2013 7:04 p.m. ET

Researchers are finding brains of women and men display distinctive differences that are shaped by the interplay of heredity, experience, and biochemistry. Science writer Robert Lee Hotz explains on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

So many things come down to connections—especially the ones in your brain.

Women and men display distinctive differences in how nerve fibers connect various regions of their brains, according to a half-dozen recent studies that highlight gender variation in the brain's wiring diagram. There are trillions of these critical connections, and they are shaped by the interplay of heredity, experience and biochemistry.

No one knows how gender variations in brain wiring might translate into thought and behavior—whether they might influence the way men and women generally perceive reality, process information, form judgments and behave socially—but they are sparking controversy.

"It certainly is incendiary," said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology and director of the University of Southern California's Imaging Genetics Center. He is directing an effort to assemble a database of 26,000 brain scans from 20 countries to cross-check neuroimaging findings. "People who look at findings about sex differences are excited or enraged," he said.

Researchers are looking at the variations to explain the different ways men and women respond to health issues ranging from autism, which is more common among men, and multiple sclerosis, which is more common among women, to strokes, aging and depression. "We have to find the differences first before we can try to understand them," said Neda Jahanshad, a neurologist at USC who led the research while at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Jahanshad and her UCLA collaborators conducted a 2011 brain-imaging study of healthy twins, including 147 women and 87 men, to trace connections in the brain. She discovered "significant" sex differences in areas of the brain's frontal lobe, which is associated with self-control, speech and decision-making.

In the most comprehensive study so far, scientists led by biomedical analyst Ragini Verma at the University of Pennsylvania found the myriad connections between important parts of the brain developed differently in girls and boys as they grow, resulting in different patterns of brain connections among young women and young men.

The team imaged the brains of 949 healthy young people, 521 females and 428 males, ranging in age from 8 to 22. Like Dr. Jahanshad's team, Dr. Verma employed a technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging to trace how water molecules align along the brain's white-matter nerve fibers, which form the physical scaffolding of thought. The study was reported earlier this month in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Enlarge Image

Pairs of scan images show gender differences in brain wiring in childhood (1), adolescence (2) and young adulthood (3). Male brains are on left, female on right. University of Pennsylvania, Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.

The neural patterns emerged only when combining results from hundreds of people, experts said. In any one person, gender patterns may be subsumed by the individual variations in brain shape and structure that help make every person unique.

Dr. Verma's maps of neural circuitry document the brain at moments when it is in a fury of creation. Starting in infancy, the brain normally produces neurons at a rate of half a million a minute, and reaches out to make connections two million times a second. By age 5, brain size on average has grown to about 90% of adult size. By age 20, the average brain is packed with about 109,000 miles of white matter tissue fibers, according to a 2003 Danish study reported in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

Spurred by the effects of diet, experience and biochemistry, neurons and synapses are ruthlessly pruned, starting in childhood. The winnowing continues in fits and starts throughout adolescence, then picks up again in middle age. "In childhood, we did not see much difference" between male and female, Dr. Verma said. "Most of the changes we see start happening in adolescence. That is when most of the male-female differences come about."

Broadly speaking, women in their 20s had more connections between the two brain hemispheres while men of the same age had more connective fibers within each hemisphere. "Women are mostly better connected left-to-right and right-to-left across the two brain hemispheres," Dr. Verma said. "Men are better connected within each hemisphere and from back-to-front."

That suggests women might be better wired for multitasking and analytical thought, which require coordination of activity in both hemispheres. Men, in turn, may be better wired for more-focused tasks that require attention to one thing a time. But the researchers cautioned such conclusions are speculative.

Experts also cautioned that subtle gender differences in connections can be thrown off by normal disparities in brain size between men and women and in the density of brain tissue. Other factors, such as whether one is left- or right-handed, also affect brain structure.

Also affecting results are differences in how computer calculations are carried out from one lab to the next. "With neuroimaging, there are so many ways to process the data that when you do process things differently and get the same result, it is fantastic," Dr. Jahanshad said.

In 2009, David Geary, a University of Missouri psychologist, published the second edition of Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences. This thorough, fair-minded, and comprehensive survey of the literature includes more than 50 pages of footnotes citing studies by neuroscientists, endocrinologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and psychologists showing a strong biological basis for many gender differences. And, as Geary recently told me, "One of the largest and most persistent differences between the sexes is children's play preferences." The female preference for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species. Researchers have found, for example, that female vervet monkeys play with dolls much more than their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. Nor can human reality be tossed aside. In all known societies, women tend to be the nurturers and men the warriors. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points to the absurdity of ascribing these universal differences to socialization: "It would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way."

Of course, we can soften and shape these roles, and that has been, in every epoch, the work of civilization. But civilization won't work against the grain of human nature, and our futile attempts to make it do so can only damage the children that are the subjects of the experiment.

I am glad the myth of the claim that some ridiculous numbers of women being sexually assaulted is starting to drip out. I have interviewed hundreds of female patients and while I agree rape of violent assault is not rare it is no where near the absurd numbers being thrown about by crazy fanatical liberals such as one out of two or three or four. These are numbers that include those who had a 24 year old reach for a breast in the movie theater being considered an assault or rape. Or worse even uncomfortable looks or even feeling uncomfortable around a man.

These numbers are so exaggerated. I ask women all the time these questions and the vast majority will reply no they were not sexually physically or emotionally abused.